Why Netflix was called Kibble before launch #DogFood

The co-founder and first CEO of Netflix, Marc Randolph, has provided the backstory to how they came up with the name of the company that has now become synonymous with online streaming.

First, I was very concerned about building a service that looked good, but that nobody wanted to use. So I choose Kibble to remind us of the old advertising adage that “It doesn’t matter how good your dog food advertising campaign is, if the dogs won’t eat the dog food”.

Marc Randolph, Co-founder & First CEO @ Netflix

Marc says since it’s hard to come up with a good name, he believes the beta name must be really bad so as to force you to come up with a better one before launch. Which is what happened with Kibble aka Netflix.

The eventually considered names such as ‘Webflix’, ‘TakeOne’, ‘NetPix’ before settling on Netflix – even though they didn’t like it. Especially as it reminded them of ‘Skin-Flicks’ i.e porn films. Plus it had the ‘x’ to go along with it.

But ‘Netflix’ it was.

And, of course, the rest is history.

By the way, Marc still owns Kibble dot com. It redirects to his personal site!